The present invention relates generally to IEEE 802.1x (The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineer's 802.1x standard) requires endpoint device authentication before enabling connection to the network port. This usually causes problems while a host is starting up and users cannot be prompted for their credentials for authentication during that time. As a result, the host may not be allowed on the network and have access to network services needed for user and machine domain logging in. An example of network services affected is Microsoft networking and active directory group policy assignment.
One approach to solve this problem is using an additional set of credentials to obtain network access for the machine before the user logs in. This is usually referred to as “Machine Authentication”. This is problematic because the server validating network access policy must have access to and manage the additional credentials. The problem is made worse if multiple vendors provide supplicants on the same machine and some vendors don't allow access to their machine credentials. Some supplicant vendors tried to workaround the problem by storing another set of credentials specifically for machine authentication, which inadvertently creates a problem for servers to manage and synchronize the additional set of credentials.